Reviewed by: Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity: Hokusai's Hyakunin Isshu John Carpenter Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity: Hokusai's Hyakunin Isshu. By Ewa Machotka. Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2009. 256 pages. Hardcover SFR45.00/€28.50/$44.95. This intellectually engaging volume takes as its foci two Japanese cultural icons: Hyakunin isshu (One hundred poets, one poem each), an early-medieval poetry anthology, and Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), a noted Edo artist of plebeian background. Ewa Machotka, who originally submitted this volume (more or less as it stands) as a doctoral dissertation for Gakushuin University in Tokyo in 2008, asserts that understanding the role of the Hundred Poets anthology and of Hokusai's visual renderings of these poems in Japanese cultural history sheds light on the very core of Japanese "national identity." Specifically, she postulates that the artist's mostly unpublished print series, playfully entitled Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki (One hundred poets, pictorial explanation by the nurse), somehow had a special role in the formulation of modern Japanese identity. While her argument seems overly ambitious to this reviewer, I nevertheless concede her well-taken point that much is to be learned from studying the reception of the Hundred Poets and Hokusai landscape prints in the broader context of Edo visual culture, and from understanding how both can be interpreted as having ideological, spiritual, or talismanic implications extending far beyond their respective literary or artistic significance. Hokusai was in his mid-seventies when he embarked on this print series in 1835, inspired by the famous anthology compiled by Fujiwara no Teika in the early thirteenth century. As representative examples of Hokusai's work in general and of woodblock prints depicting classical literary themes in particular, the pieces in this incomplete series are indeed [End Page 161] among the (several) triumphs of the artist's career. As Machotka describes in meticulous detail, Hokusai and his publishers saw through to completion twenty-seven of the planned hundred designs. It appears that the artist executed final or at least preliminary designs for all or nearly all—ninety-one are known. The designs ultimately unrealized in Hokusai's day survive as fifty-five finished preparatory drawings (hanshita-e), one keyblock print, four photomechanical reproductions of original drawings printed posthumously in the late nineteenth century, and four prints produced in 1921 by the Kyoto publisher Satō Shōtarō (ca.1895-1931), who created the prints from blocks carved using original surviving hanshita-e. The project was abandoned amid the famine and economic crises of the mid-1830s. We learn in the opening lines of Machotka's introduction that Hokusai had written to his publisher explaining that he planned to have his daughter Ōi (Oei) do the preparatory drawings (originally in book format, it seems), but the by-then elderly artist ultimately decided to do them himself (in a single-sheet print series). We know that Ōi, one of the most talented illustrators and painters of the late Edo period, was in fact living with her father at this time and often assisted in preparatory work on some of his landscape prints and book illustrations, and we can safely suppose that she collaborated on paintings signed by her father as well. I was surprised by Machotka's claim that Katsushika Ōi had created her own illustrated version of the Hundred Poets—auspiciously entitled Senzai hyakunin isshu Yamato kotobuki (One thousand years of Hyakunin isshu Yamato longevity)—over a half dozen years before her father began the print series (pp. 18, 81, and chapter 4, passim). Later in the volume, Machotka uses numerous designs from that publication as comparative material when discussing père Hokusai's more elaborate versions. But there seems to be some confusion about the provenance of those disappointingly banal designs, since to this reviewer's knowledge Ōi illustrated only two books under her own name, and this title has never been included in lists of her work. Perhaps Machotka was misled by the fact that the rare edition (and perhaps only surviving copy) of Senzai Hyakunin isshu Yamato kotobuki, owned by the Atomi University Library, was at some point rebound together with a book of female conduct, Z...
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Oct 24, 2018
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